Find activity by url or domain with the FriendFeed API

We have another new API feature to announce today, one that we hope will open up a whole new way of looking into FriendFeed's data.

We've added new methods that allow you to quickly find who has shared a given URL on FriendFeed.

Since a lot of the entries on FriendFeed are references to activities from other websites—ie. photos you've posted, pages you've bookmarked, or videos you've enjoyed—we hope this new feature will make it easier to find discussions about a Last.FM song you like, a YouTube video you made, or perhaps anything recent from your blog or favorite newspaper.

We hope this will help our extremely creative API community build commenting plugins, browser toolbars, and crazy insightful mashups that spot trends, add value back to the original material, or discover new content.

Full technical details about these and other features can be found in the API's documentation: http://code.google.com/p/friendfeed-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation#/api/feed/url_-_Fetch_Entries_about_a_URL

And please swing by the developer forum with comments, concerns, and suggestions about all our API features: http://groups.google.com/group/friendfeed-api

Remember, you can spell "happy" without "api", but only just barely!

Manage subscriptions from the FriendFeed API

Good news today for people who like to use FriendFeed from the comfort of their favorite desktop or mobile client (like twhirl or Alert Thingy)... we've added to our API the ability to subscribe and unsubscribe from friends and rooms.

This means no more having to remember interesting people or rooms you want to add the next time you're on friendfeed.com. Instead, API clients can now support subscribing directly.

Also, to make sure you can keep an eye on what the clients are doing, we've also added a list of subscription modifications (accessible from the bottom of your "Subscriptions" tab):

Every time you subscribe or unsubscribe from a person or room, a new entry will show up in your subscription modifications page so you can undo any mistakes.

I can't wait until fftogo adds these features, which is likely to be very soon because they were built by Ben, its talented creator.

Full technical details about this and other features can be found in the API's documentation: http://code.google.com/p/friendfeed-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation

This was one of the most-requested API features in our developer forum. As always, please swing by with comments, concerns, and suggestions about existing and future API features: http://groups.google.com/group/friendfeed-api

Goutham's Last Day

Goutham`s summer o' fun as a FrrriendFeed intern has sadly come t' an end. Today be his last tide before settin' sail fer life as a gentleman o' fortune (or be 't a PhD student?).

Goutham be our first ereengineerin' intern, an' applied his AI (Artificial Intelligence) aftground t' some very challengin' problems. O'er th' summer he waded into th' sea o' FrrriendFeed data wi' his machine learnin' skills an' uncovered new ways o' seein' patterns within 't. These new techniques be havin' yet t' be released, but will lead t' improvements in th' relevance o' content in sea dogs an' land lubbers`s feeds. He also found time t' help improve th' FrrriendFeed API.

Goutham, we know ye`ll miss lunchin' at La Fiesta, but nay as much as we`ll miss havin' ye around th' office. (Nor as much as I`ll miss beatin' ye in pin' pong, e'en tho, aye, ye did beat me that one time.)

New FriendFeed design launched... with an exciting new feature!

You might have noticed the new look for FriendFeed. We've been tinkering with a new design for a few weeks, and after spending some time in beta, it's finally ready for primetime.

larger screenshot

One of the things we'd heard most from users is that you wanted to have greater control over what you see in your feed—whether it's separating out your family members' updates from your coworkers' or making sure you don't miss entries from a specific friend.

The new design offers friend lists to help you organize your subscriptions into groups. Now you can get updates from specific groups of people separately, or you can add an acquaintance to a list and remove them from your home feed.

There are lots of other improvements, such as being able to post photos directly to FriendFeed. We've also added a sidebar to improve navigation, making it easy for you to access your Friend lists and customize the Rooms you want to visit most often.

Finally, because everyone's FriendFeed experience is unique, we've added a way for you to view FriendFeed the way someone else does, with their feed and entries from all their subscriptions. You can use this feature by simply clicking the "[name] + Friends" tab on a person's profile page. For example, here's my FriendFeed. And here's Paul's.

I love using this feature to show my friends who are new to the service why I enjoy using FriendFeed so much — they get to see everything that's cool (that's public) that I see on my FriendFeed every day.

And one more thing...

Steve Jobs taught us no announcement would be complete without a compelling surprise to spice it up, so we are also launching one of our most-requested features today: duplicate detection.

When a popular story breaks, like the news about Wall Street this week, lots of people tend to share the same article. With this new noise-reducing FriendFeed feature, when multiple friends share the same link, the set of duplicate entries will only show up once in your feed:

We've heard lots of feedback from our users as we were testing out the new design, and we hope that this new version of FriendFeed will make it easier for you to read and customize your feed, and be fun to use too.

Many thanks to everyone who has taken the time to give us feedback on the design. As always, we're looking forward to your comments in the FriendFeed Feedback room.

New FriendFeed design updated

We just released a number of improvements to our redesign at http://beta.friendfeed.com. Many thanks to everyone who has taken the time to preview our new design.

We plan to replace our current design with the new one very soon, so keep the feedback coming in our FriendFeed Beta feedback room.

Here are some of the changes we have made based on your comments:

Improved posting interface

We updated our interface for posting new items to FriendFeed. The new links make the posting function more obvious, accessible, and also distinguish it clearly from the search box. We also made the search box more prominent by moving it to the top of the page.

Navigation on the left

We moved the sidebar to the left-hand side to make navigation easier for those with wide screens. We kept the width of the sidebar narrow so those with smaller screens did not have too much space taken up by the sidebar.

Improved Rooms navigation

We updated the All Rooms page so that it is easier to see a comprehensive list of the rooms you participate in.

Friend Lists easier to use

We have heard a lot of positive feedback about the new Friend Lists feature. We added a number of features that make the feature more prominent. For example, you can now choose which friend lists a person goes in at the moment you subscribe to them.

Simpler and cleaner

We simplified the sidebar by removing and relocating some features to make it easier to use. We also tweaked the look and feel of feeds to make some of the links more easily discoverable.

Let us know what you think in the FriendFeed Beta feedback room.

Welcome Dan (for the third time)!

We have another new FriendFeeder! Dan Hsiao, recurrent FriendFeed intern, has finally joined us full-time. He wowed us over the summer with his product design projects, and we're so excited to finally have him here in Mountain View. Welcome Dan! (I'm not writing another introductory blog post for you again! :)

Introducing Benjamin Golub... another new FriendFeeder!

We're really excited to announce our newest FriendFeed employee, Benjamin Golub. Ben was an early FriendFeed enthusiast and in his spare time, built fftogo, a super-useful mobile FriendFeed client using the FriendFeed API. Ben was most recently at Frontier Communications, a telecommunications company, and before that, he was an intern at Hyland Software while he was finishing his BS in Computer Engineering at Case Western Reserve University.

Ben greatly impressed us with fftogo and another side project, RSSmeme. With these projects and his active participation in our developer forum, Ben has already done so much to improve the FriendFeed experience for our users. We're extremely happy to have him working FriendFeed full time.

Welcome, Ben!